Pulling The Strings
©2008 Michael Barlow


This document is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 UK: England & Wales license, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/.

Chapter 1

The car park was empty as Victoria reached the train station. As it was midwinter, and after six in the evening, the entire road was quiet. She could see her breath as she shivered away the cold, trudging through the slush on the path that was once snow. The train station was small and unmanned, the main building had been sold and transformed into a garden centre years before Victoria came to the town.
Although it did still receive maintenance from the rail company that owned it, it was obvious the repairs did not occur frequently. The wooden stairs to the platforms were old and rotting, and the paint on the shelters was flaking away to expose the pale green mould beneath. The shelters themselves had been heavily vandalised, with holes in the wood where feet had been kicked through.
As Victoria neared her platform, she looked down the pedestrian subway which ran underneath the tracks to provide access to the opposite platform. The lights had been smashed making it impossible to see through the darkness to the other side. With the stench of urine flooding the air toward the tunnel entrance, Victoria struggled to hold down the contents of her stomach as she hurried past.
Ducking past the platform light which had filled with some form of liquid which was presently soaking the asphalt beneath it, she quickly glanced across the tracks to confirm she was alone. Sitting down on the metal waiting benches bolted to the concrete, she removed the plastic lid from her take-away coffee cup and inhaled deeply to remove the smell of drunken piss from her nose. She hated that tunnel. Each morning when she arrived for work, she had to walk through it to get out of the train station. The inebriates would use it as a public urinal over the weekend, a tradition which was steeped in so much non-history that the odour had saturated the brickwork and now was impossible to remove.
The station was totally empty. Nobody in their right mind would want to sit outside far from the heat, waiting for a train that will most likely be late. Unfortunately for her, Victoria was unable to drive and did not know of anyone who travelled in her direction.
She sipped at her coffee whilst reading the new graffiti. The bench for some reason had been covered in writing, mostly derogatory toward somebody called 'LeeK' which eventually, toward the far end of the bench, descended into racist defamations. It didn't surprise her in the least. She had been working in the town for the past year, and many within the population were far from friendly. The town wasn't known for it's education.
The bottom of her vision changed colour to a deep mauve. This was soon followed by the bass rumbling of the freight train passing by. Victoria's vision often changed colour depending on what she was listening to. Simple non-verbal sounds were blocks of colour originating from the rough direction of the sound. Speech, however, looked completely different. Every word she could make out consciously, and few that she couldn't, would appear as subtitles across her eyes. Certain words would be coloured, and others would be hard to see. Every word was always the same colour or shade- she particularly liked the word 'smell' because it produced a rainbow every time she heard it. It was such a comforting array of colours that she would use it to de-stress.
Of course, screaming the word 'smell' when your bank card is swallowed by the cash machine often got her some very strange looks. As did the faces she pulled when anybody said 'Gordon', as the name was such a bright yellow she would instinctively retract her head and squint as though looking into a bright light. She often found herself apologising, although her current regular clients by that name (and others she found unsightly) were aware of her condition and made efforts not to discomfort her.
She was a acupuncturist by trade, having graduated from a university course in complimentary medicine less than two years ago. Her home town of Tullton-on-Shaw didn't have any facilities of that sort, so she had been forced to seek employment in the nearby town of North Lorton. Of course, Victoria had considered opening her own business, although her bank refused to help as she had yet to pay off her overdraft.
The mauve returned to her vision again. Seeing her train pull up to the platform she quickly plugged her ears. As the train came to a halt, the stentorian screeching of metal-on-metal blinded her, covering the world in scarlet, despite her attempts to shut out the noise. It took a few seconds for her vision to return to normal.
As she looked at her watch, the conductor climbed off the train and chuckled.
"I know, I know. Some get's nabbed off with the signalling wire at Welsey Weir. It took us twenty minutes before it we were allowed to carry on." He smiled at her as she dropped her coffee into the bin next to her bench and stepped into the carriage.
His words were interesting. The local dialect was wavy, and mostly coloured in pastels, which made the neon orange 'signalling' stand out like a sore thumb. Victoria never knew if her brain was trying to tell her if the highlighted words were important somehow, though they hadn't been so far. She turned around to face the conductor.
"Again? Have the police figured where all that cable's going yet?" Her apostrophes were unusually large today for some reason. Normally nothing changed; her subtitles were always the same colour, same size and same shape. 'Signalling' was always neon orange and fuzzy, 'smell' was always rainbow coloured and soft, and 'urine' was always appropriately yellow. The large apostrophe was so unusual that she almost didn't finish her question.
"Not so far, no." He closed the carriage doors.
As the train jerked forward, the world flooded with red again, although less opaque than previously. She plugged her ears with the earphones of her digital audio player and turned the volume up as high as it would go. The sound of the dawn chorus twittered through her head, accompanied by gentle piano music. Ambient music calmed her eyes down, the gentle sounds making the world crisp and unbloodied by harsh noises. Instead, a fresh blue light pulsated throughout the train, blocking out the brown beat from below.
A slight turquoise ripple passed by, although she couldn't hear it above the fresh nocturne that was playing, her subconscious certainly noticed it. It had begun to rain, the windows of the carriage were suddenly dotted with tiny droplets. As it rained harder, the turquoise ripple became stronger, although it somehow complimented the rhythmic blue.
The train had yet to leave North Lorton, and the lights from the street made the drizzle quite easy to see. Victoria peered out of the window as a level crossing passed by in a haze of greens and whites. She squinted her eyes, trying to focus beyond her reflection in the glass. There was something wrong with what she saw. The train passed between tall embankments, blocking the street lamps and inhibiting her ability to see outside the train. As she passed another level crossing, she could see the mistake.
The rain was travelling upwards.
It wasn't bouncing off the road, making it appear to travel against the laws of gravity, it was physically falling in the wrong direction. Victoria shook her head. It must be an illusion, she thought.
Words of salmon pink and violet appeared across her view.
"Tickets please."
She removed her earphones with one hand whilst delving into her pockets with her other, eventually producing a pass. After a quick glance the conductor returned the rear of the train, ducking past a drip that had started from the light at the end of the carriage.
The light had begun to fill with some form of liquid, although Victoria couldn't see quite what the liquid was, as the brown thumping of the train clouded her vision. It may have been oil, but she certain it wasn't rain water.
She saw a mumbling, which originated from a sleeping drunk toward the front of the carriage. It wasn't in a language she knew, although she could see its pronunciation quite well. It sounded somewhat like Latin.
"Excipio lumen ut rememdium somnium of a aeger vir."
It seemed strange that a drunkard would be mumbling a dead language in his sleep, but she shrugged it away. But them the words took a different shape. The letters no longer synched with the lips of the inebriate, who was still maundering in Latin, but instead read something entirely different.
Victoria, hello Victoria. Are you feeling well?
Victoria began to feel a little ill, as the words she saw were not being spoken on the train. At least, not that she could hear. She turned around to look down the the carriage, but the inebriate was the only other on board.
The light at the end of the carriage was completely occupied with the fluid, and had begun to leak into the next light. The drips became more frequent, sending shades of black oscillating through the railcar.
Have you ever wanted to reach up and cut the strings that bind you, Victoria?
As she glanced behind her once more, eight people appeared. Shaking her head, Victoria shut her eyes and held them closed. The train had no calling points between North Lorton and Tullton-on-Shaw, so it was impossible for eight people to have climbed aboard since she last looked. She opened her eyes once more.
The people didn't seem to be alive. Their heads lolled with the movement of the carriage as though asleep, but their skin was grey and their lips blue. The two furthest from her had thick rope quite clearly tied around their necks, whilst the others had marks to suggest they once had nooses too.
Ever seen a grown man struggle for air, Victoria?
She clamped her eyes shut again. When she opened them, the bodies had gone.
As he swings, fruitlessly kicking his legs in attempt to gain a foothold which would allow him to breathe again?
The whole carriage lurched violently as the train passed over a set of rough track points, and the door to the driver's cab swung open. Victoria caught a glimpse of a man wearing a mask and black hood before it slammed shut again with a blast of indigo. The mask looked familiar, it was white with a long drooping 'beak' of sorts.
His face going grey- "We are now arriving at Tullton-on-Shaw."
She welcomed the interruption of her stop announcement. Grabbing her bag, she walked unsteadily to the carriage doors, bracing herself as the train slowed quite harshly, the red flooding past her eyes once more.
"You all right, duck?" The conductor's concerned look slowly replaced the scarlet.
"I'm fine, ta. I'm just a little tired, that's all." She paused and looked down the carriage once more. It was empty, except for the drunkard, and nothing seemed amiss. Even the lights were free from the fluid that once filled them. "I think I'm starting to see things."
"You sound like you need a lie down. Gerroff home and put the kettle on." He smiled as she stepped off the train.
Tullton-on-Shaw rail station was empty. But then, the entire town was virtually empty. It once housed a reasonable population of twenty thousand until Clemen's Steel Works and Engineering, the towns main income provider, went bankrupt and had to close twenty five years ago in 1984. Although the town continued, the population gradually decline until it reached its present size of less than two thousand. Not even housing prices at rock bottom seemed to attract people in. Victoria had bought her three bedroom semi-detached house for just three thousand pounds. It was in perfect condition, but even so she was the only one to look at it. With a price that low, she wasn't on the property ladder despite owning the house outright, and so it would still make it difficult for her to move elsewhere.
She walked out of the station, and waved at the dark figure who was locking up the garage across the road.
"Evening Mark!" She yelled to him. Eventually he noticed her, and waved back.
"In need of a lift?"
They both turned their attention to a ranting shape that was stumbling underneath the street lights, scribbling on an old newspaper and grumbling about 'how the numbers don't add up'. The peculiar odour emanating from the shape confirmed its identity as the towns only remaining vagrant. The others had been given accommodation by the council to at least fill some of the empty  buildings. Jonothan had refused, his declining mental health may have been affecting his decisions.
Victoria briskly walked over to the mechanic, "Yeah, I'll take you up on that."